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{ Thursday, March 20, 2003 }





Winnicott, Play, Potential Spaces and A Rape in Cyberspace



Play is life, as some companies claim. 


I was interested in finding out more about the ideas of British psychoanalyst 
D.W. Winnicott, whose ideas of "transitional objects" and "holding environments" I'd recently learned of (see Tuesday's post). Some quotes:


"Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play." (from "Playing: Its Theoretical Status in the Clinical Situation," 1971)


"The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing. Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested as play." (from "Playing: Its Theoretical Status in the Clinical Situation," 1971)


"It is in the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people--the transitional space--that intimate relationships and creativity occur." (from "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," 1951) 


"When symbolism is employed the infant is already clearly distinguishing between fantasy and fact, between inner objects and external objects, between primary creativity and perception." (from "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon," 1951) 



 I also found an interesting article about the uses of Winnicott's Potential Spaces in creativity by Michael Szollosy, which looks at the theory of potential spaces and their use as a locus of creativity in a depersonalized, postmodern world. There are more passages about play there:


Play is more than merely the expression of individual interiority or the     discursive exchange between "doctor" and "patient." Playing is a creative,     communicative experience where subjects meet; it is not wholly the domain of either     participant. Winnicott further explains that "only in playing is communication     possible; except direct communication [such as acting out], which belongs to     psychopathology or to an extreme immaturity" (1971, 54). Play, as communication, is     primarily intersubjective, and takes place at the point of paradoxical intersection     between subjectivities. Play permits the movement of experience from that of the entirely     subjective object-world to mutual subject recognition, and provides a basis for our     symbolic use of objects. 



Another thing that Szollosy wrote caught my eye:


This space is an area in which the infant can be challenged and experiment, but must also (Winnicott insists) be a place of rest     "for the human individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated"



These symbolic spaces are something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially as regards The Game Neverending. Online games and communities can be  fantastic "potential spaces" or "holding environments" for collective creativity, but they can also be territories where aggressive fantasies can be acted out without fear of consequences, by people who feel safe in the anonymity of online personae.


I received an email yesterday from Julian Dibbell, and was reminded to reread his essay A Rape in Cyberspace, as it is pertinent to issues which may  arise in the game. The essay, if you haven't read it, concerns a rape that occurred online in a well-populated living room in LambdaMOO, and how the community sought to define the nature of the crime, the proper punishment and all the knotty problems surrounding its virtuality. He writes about the erosion of the distinction between the symbolic and the real:


 I have come to hear in [these thoughts] an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era's definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. 



Symbolic or Real? Fantasy or Actuality? Play or Life? As Catherine MacKinnon and Patrick Naughton can attest, this is the great metaphysical question of our age. 













	LINK 	|  1:38 AM | TB 





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{ COMMENTS }




Good lord.  I've never participated in any role-playing games, and after reading the Dibbell essay I have no desire to.  I absolutely believe him when he says that after a newbie period you get so immersed that the virtual world seems sort-of-as-real as the "real" one, and you take things like "virtual rape" very seriously.  While not denying the reality of the emotional involvement, it also strikes me as the equivalent of becoming a drug addict.  Once you get hooked on heroin, the drug, its world, and the problems of obtaining it become of surpassing concern, and the things the "straight" world take seriously fade into the far background.  That's emotional reality; it's also foolish and destructive when seen from outside.  Not that I'm saying participating in VR is the same as being a drug addict -- but I don't see much difference in terms of walling yourself off into a self-contained universe.  And in a world that's more dangerous than ever in terms of getting your real body blown apart, it seems, well, self-indulgent.  I know, I know, so are my books and my languages.  Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.  But I ain't settin' foot in any MUDs, not even if they offer to make me a wizard.

steve | March 20, 2003  7:23 AM



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Re: Play:

I like what Bernd Heinrich has to say on this in Mind of the Raven



"I suspect that play is almost literally like intelligence. Play is an acting out of options, among which the best can then be chosen, strengthened or facilitated in the future. The difference is that with play, the options are all played out overtly, not only in the mind. With intelligence, only the best options (and some of the worst) are played out overtly, and often much more quickly."



Heinrich describes some amazing 'raven' play, which clearly has no Darwinian 'purpose': swinging while hanging upside down, tug-of-war, snow-bathing, barrel-rolls, talon-locking with siblings in flight, king-of-the-birdbath, dive-bombing gorillas, and upside-down gliding in updrafts.

Dave Pollard | March 20, 2003 10:03 AM



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i really resist making a distinction between what happens in game spaces as being somehow separate from "real" life. that sort of thinking has let people dismiss incidents like those described by Julian in his essay. i think Julian initially was too timid, or something, to fully defend what happened in LambdaMOO as real. In his book, "My Tiny Life", he goes further with his anlysis.



my point is, what happens in these online worlds is just as real as what happens offline. just because it didn't happen on earth doesn't mean it didn't happen. i mean, it's all real. now, the nature of what happened is of course different, and that can be debated - no one has ever suggested that "virtual" rape is the same as physical rape, because that would be ridiculous. but to compare game players to drug addicts seems like an unconstructive analogy to me. A heroin habit cuts you off from people and things; but the sort of games Julian describes are made solely of community. the game is other people. 



i'd like to excise the semantics that confine "real" to mere physical space. there's so much more to life. and we need a better vocabulary to reflect that!

jane | March 20, 2003  6:20 PM



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this site was a great help for my reseach and i got a perfect mark thank you luv steph -x-x-

steph | November 17, 2003  4:23 AM



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Caterina et al:



Y'know I just ran into the discussion on play approving Winnicott's approach to the subject. From a diagnostic and therapeutic perspective, this is potentially harmful, and you should know it. I am a play theorist, so you may want to tune me out at this point. And it may be old business at this point. But you should know what the counter arguments are, and how many bad hours have been spent by those following W. in this direction. esp. those with weak abilities to communicate conversationally, much less in a therapeutically inspired interaction. W. and his followers follow the line of thinking that there is an inter-space between speaker and hearer. There isn't a problem usually in deciding whether a serious or a just playing conversation is taking place. But we do have the luxury of having retrospective replaying, so that you can say something, judge its reception, and go back in your interpretive schema by say "that's a joke" or "I'm just playing, y'know." When that happens, yoou have to think about how far back you have to go in the conversation when the just-playing began. It's like a backward wink -- you don't know where the message of suspending literal interpretation begins and ends, unless the conversant happens to have other gestures which provide the information of where the play ends. Even normally shy people have trouble making such a judgment call in the midst of a conversation, and even more of a problem doing so in what she/he regards as a therapy session. What I am saying is that playing is too important of a social and psychological mechanism to undercut its effect by creating a world between the serious and the playful. Boundary maintenance is all important in just this area with those with problems with emotional volatility. I am not a therapist, so my experience is limited, but haven't we all had embarassing moments when we have been joking and been taken seriously or vice-versa. To this is one area of experience where maintaining a boundary --even a pourous boundary-- between serious messages and playfully produced ones. The playfully produced ones, in fact, will be misunderstood by anyone who doesn't catch the cues that play is taking place. I am not appealing to any arcane theory here, but the social common sense we get through growing up human. Of course,play, like art, calls for a willing suspension of disbelief. But unlike art, the suspension has an immediate possible consequence. You want to make someone really dizzy or anxious and you will invite them into this middle world without having an in-common understanding of it ahead of time. This is not inconsequential. I've seen at least two people commit suicide because they could not make the shift quickly enough in a group situation, and they wandered away from the group and never made it back. Sure there are other proconditions illustrating instability, but not of the sort that we can pick up on our radar that easily. One was a religious worker, one a psychiatric nurse. Yes, this is anecdotal, and shouldn't be taken to be any kind of truth. 



But with the recent Janet Jackson demonstration at the Super Bowl half-time, the consequences of this kind of play genre confusion can be seen coursing throughout that part of the world that cares about both football and Janet Jackson or any other half-time entertainer. 



I know, I know. I shouldn't take myself so seriously. I'm told that all of the time. But having witnessed these disasters, I guess I became shot-gun shy about twenty years ago. 



To recapitulate in a more jargonistic way, Winnicott and co. privelege a play world of their own making, and then they reify it. They opine that there already exists an in-between play world which can be experienced by everyone, and then they prove it with a "try it, you'll like it" approach. That is dangerous reification, the very kind that megalomaniacs and borderline personalities argue in favor of, and then utilize it for illicit power purposes. If you want to be tooled around with, go across those psychological boundaries and abandon all hope. 



roger abrahams | February  9, 2004 10:55 AM



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Caterina et al:



Y'know I just ran into the discussion on play approving Winnicott's approach to the subject. From a diagnostic and therapeutic perspective, this is potentially harmful, and you should know it. I am a play theorist, so you may want to tune me out at this point. And it may be old business at this point. But you should know what the counter arguments are, and how many bad hours have been spent by those following W. in this direction. esp. those with weak abilities to communicate conversationally, much less in a therapeutically inspired interaction. W. and his followers follow the line of thinking that there is an inter-space between speaker and hearer. There isn't a problem usually in deciding whether a serious or a just playing conversation is taking place. But we do have the luxury of having retrospective replaying, so that you can say something, judge its reception, and go back in your interpretive schema by say "that's a joke" or "I'm just playing, y'know." When that happens, yoou have to think about how far back you have to go in the conversation when the just-playing began. It's like a backward wink -- you don't know where the message of suspending literal interpretation begins and ends, unless the conversant happens to have other gestures which provide the information of where the play ends. Even normally shy people have trouble making such a judgment call in the midst of a conversation, and even more of a problem doing so in what she/he regards as a therapy session. What I am saying is that playing is too important of a social and psychological mechanism to undercut its effect by creating a world between the serious and the playful. Boundary maintenance is all important in just this area with those with problems with emotional volatility. I am not a therapist, so my experience is limited, but haven't we all had embarassing moments when we have been joking and been taken seriously or vice-versa. To this is one area of experience where maintaining a boundary --even a pourous boundary-- between serious messages and playfully produced ones. The playfully produced ones, in fact, will be misunderstood by anyone who doesn't catch the cues that play is taking place. I am not appealing to any arcane theory here, but the social common sense we get through growing up human. Of course,play, like art, calls for a willing suspension of disbelief. But unlike art, the suspension has an immediate possible consequence. You want to make someone really dizzy or anxious and you will invite them into this middle world without having an in-common understanding of it ahead of time. This is not inconsequential. I've seen at least two people commit suicide because they could not make the shift quickly enough in a group situation, and they wandered away from the group and never made it back. Sure there are other proconditions illustrating instability, but not of the sort that we can pick up on our radar that easily. One was a religious worker, one a psychiatric nurse. Yes, this is anecdotal, and shouldn't be taken to be any kind of truth. 



But with the recent Janet Jackson demonstration at the Super Bowl half-time, the consequences of this kind of play genre confusion can be seen coursing throughout that part of the world that cares about both football and Janet Jackson or any other half-time entertainer. 



I know, I know. I shouldn't take myself so seriously. I'm told that all of the time. But having witnessed these disasters, I guess I became shot-gun shy about twenty years ago. 



To recapitulate in a more jargonistic way, Winnicott and co. privelege a play world of their own making, and then they reify it. They opine that there already exists an in-between play world which can be experienced by everyone, and then they prove it with a "try it, you'll like it" approach. That is dangerous reification, the very kind that megalomaniacs and borderline personalities argue in favor of, and then utilize it for illicit power purposes. If you want to be tooled around with, go across those psychological boundaries and abandon all hope. 



roger abrahams | February  9, 2004 10:55 AM



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